Regional

Cross-Border Commons

The Cross-Border Commons is an ambitious transnational environmental conservancy initiative that links the Tijuana River Estuary in San Diego with the Los Laureles Canyon settlements in Tijuana in a continuous political, social and ecological zone to protect the water and environmental resources shared by these border cities. To steward The Cross-Border Commons, we are summoning a coalition of state and municipal agencies, grassroots organizations and universities on both sides of the border to collectively invest in sustainable environmental programming.

This unorthodox binational land conservancy expands notions of conservation beyond protection, activating them as green infrastructure with specific environmental, pedagogical and social programming. With local community groups, we are co-developing some of these slivers as public spaces with a double function: water-waste management infrastructure and pedagogical nodes, to protect the shared hydrological-environmental resources of the bioregion. This has included bottom-up socio-ecological planning to inject many of the archipelago’s islands with nature-based solutions, eco-strategies and eco-technologies to restore the habitat and support biodiversity. These include: native plant restoration, reforestation and deep root planting on slopes, water catchment and stream daylighting, erosion control along water routes, constructed mini-wetlands, gray water hydro-filtration channels, swales and kumeyaay rock drop infrastructure, rewilding through revegetation, gabion terracing and eco-technologies for slope stabilization, topsoil regeneration and activation, native plants seed propagation for pollinators, removal of high-risk non-native species, establishing and reinforcing biodiversity corridors and support systems for bird and animal migration.